Apple's Tim Cook: iPad Cannibalization Good for PC Industry

Apple CEO Tim Cook used a keynote speech to suggest that iPad competition is ultimately beneficial for the PC industry as a whole.

Apple CEO Tim
Cook used a Feb. 14 keynote at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet
Conference in San Francisco to offer some insights into both the iPad and the
tablet industry as a whole.
After praising
the iPads effect on the tech industry overall, Cook suggested that quality,
and not a low price, is ultimately what drives unit sales. Price is rarely the
important thing, he said, according to an edited
transcript provided by Fortune.
I think people at the end of the day, they want a great product. He suggested
that Amazons Kindle Fire, a $199 tablet designed primarily for streaming
content and ebooks, would ultimately sell a lot of unitswhile adding that the
customers that were designing our products for, are not going to be satisfied
with a limited function kind of product.

Cook also took
a gentle swipe at other manufacturers tablet efforts. What happened last
year, everyone that was in the PC industry and everybody that was in the phone
industry, everybody decided they had to do a tablet, he said. Everybody was
kind of aiming at iPad 1, and we were trying to innovate quickly to get to iPad
2. So, by the time they had something that they thought could compete with iPad
1, we were on iPad 2.

From there,
Cook tackled a much-discussed topic in recent quarters: whether or not the iPad
is cannibalizing sales of traditional PCs. I think that iPad has cannibalized
some Mac sales, he conceded. And the way that we already view cannibalization
is, we prefer we do it than have somebody else do it. Because of that, he
added, We never want to hold back one of our teams from building the absolute
greatest thing, even if it takes some sales from another product area.
However, he
saw tablets as ultimately beneficial for the tech industry as a whole.
I think itll
be good for the PC industry, because theyve got this strong competitor, and I
think itll be good for tablets, because theyll innovate like crazy over
here, he said. And I do think that, out of that, there will still be a strong
PC industry. I just think the tablet industry is going to be larger in units
than the PC industry.
According to
the ever-buzzing rumor mill (sparked by a Feb. 9 report in AllThingsD),
Apples next iPad will make its debut at the beginning of March. Other sources
have widely speculated that the device will feature a next-generation
processor, a high-resolution Retina Display, and support for 4G LTE
(Long-Term Evolution).
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Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.